[Guest] Anatomy of an Internship

Project CHART: How eight months in the basement of the Brooklyn Public Library turned me into a Digital Project Manager.

Nora Almeida is a Brooklyn-based poet and MLIS student at Pratt Institute, where she is currently working towards a certificate in Digital Curation. Some of her LIS interests include: new media preservation, scholarly communication, and the open access movement. She works at the National Archives.

During the first semester of my MLIS program at Pratt Institute and after nearly 7 years as a college student, I had begun to think that there were only two kinds of internships: good internships and paid internships. Last winter, when I was given grant funding to complete a digital management certificate program and the opportunity to work for two semesters as an intern on a cross-institutional digital cultural heritage project, I was thankfully proven very wrong. Project CHART (Cultural Heritage, Access, Research, & Technology) is a three-year Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded initiative that aims to simultaneously train future digital managers and generate a shared repository for historic Brooklyn images from the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), Brooklyn Museum, and Brooklyn Historical Society collections.

Brooklyn Public Library facade - by Nora Almeida

I was one of six first-year interns and was able to learn how a large, multi-institutional digital project is built from the ground up. For eight months I spent one day per week in the Morgue (the affectionately named sub-terranean archival storage and digital lab space at the BPL) digitizing historic photographs (circa 1920s-1970s), conducting research on best practices for digitization and archival storage, comparing web repository platforms, reviewing OAI-PMH compliance criteria, creating metadata for digitized images and crosswalks for metadata conversions, generating comprehensive procedure documents and project workflows, and sitting in on planning meetings with the Brooklyn Collection Staff and BPL IT team. I also had the opportunity to work with some really awesome, knowledgeable people who I continue to look to for guidance and encouragement.

Concurrent with the internship, I started taking classes within the new digital management curriculum at Pratt, attending workshops, conferences, and lectures sponsored or facilitated by Project CHART, and most importantly, I began to realize what kind of librarian I wanted to be. While not every MLIS student will get an opportunity like Project CHART, every lib school student should advocate for themselves to get the skills and applicable experience they will need to hit the ground running after graduation.

Extra – here’s a brief slideshow and another digital portfolio from Marina Kastan, also a Pratt student, who interned for Project CHART at the Brooklyn Museum at the same time that Nora was at Brooklyn Public Library.

Editors Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I met Nora when I was working as the Project Coordinator on CHART, and I supervised her in this internship. I was (and am still) very excited about the project, especially the partnership of a library, archive and museum and a library school, and I think the website Nora developed as a culmination of her internship is a really great example of the sorts of things students can do to exhibit their skills and experience. — Micah